Sermon quotes on atonement
Anselm
The debt was so great, that while man alone owed it, only God could pay it.
Karl Barth
[Jesus Christ] is the atonement as the fulfillment of the covenant. To say atonement is to say Jesus Christ.
Church Dogmatics Volume IV.1., Hendrickson Publishers, p.122, 158.
Karl Barth
He Himself, Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, was justified by God in His resurrection from the dead. He was justified as man, and in Him as the Representative of all men all were justified.
Church Dogmatics Volume IV.1., Hendrickson Publishers, pp.305-306.
Karl Barth
It is as God identifies Himself with man—His participation and intervention is as direct and complete as that—it is as He becomes a man and as this man the Representative of all men, it is as He makes His own the cause of all men that justification can and does take place.
Church Dogmatics Volume IV.1., Hendrickson Publishers, p.551.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.”
Emil Brunner
In Christianity faith in the Mediator is not something optional, not something about which, in the last resort, it is possible to hold different opinions, if we are only united on the ‘main point’. For faith in the Mediator – in the event which took place once for all, a revealed atonement – is the Christian religion itself; it is the ‘main point’; it is not something alongside of the centre; it is the substance and kernel, not the husk. This is so true that we may even say: in distinction from all other forms of religion, the Christian religion is faith in the one Mediator…And there is no other possibility of being a Christian than through faith in that which took place once for all, revelation and atonement through the Mediator.
Sheri Dew
…I fear that some of us understand just enough about the gospel to feel guilty–guilty that we are not measuring up to some undefinable standard–but not enough about the Atonement to feel the peace and strength, the power and mercy it affords us.
Billy Graham
Superficial views of God and His holiness will produce superficial views of sin and atonement. God hates sin. It is His uncompromising foe. Sin is vile and detestable in the sight of God . . .The sinner and God are at opposite poles of the moral universe.”
Michael Hardin
The inevitability of the death of Jesus does not stem from God’s need but from humanity’s. There are only two roles to play in the tale of divine and human relationships, persecutor or persecuted. God can cause suffering or God can suffer. God in Christ chose the latter.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Consider, finally, what it meant to Him to do this for us. “I go,” He says. Where is He going? He is going to the Garden of Gethsemane to sweat drops of blood. Where is He going? He is going to be arrested, to be tried in court, to be mocked and jeered and laughed at. He is going to be spat upon, to have His holy body scourged. He is going to have a crown of thorns placed upon His head. They will take Him and drive cruel nails into His blessed hands and feet. He is going to be nailed to a tree. Can you picture it happening to you, with nails being hammered in through hands and feet? That is what He is going to. And, too, He is going to endure the mockery and the spitting and the jeering of the cruel mob; they did not know who He was or what He was doing. He is going to die and to be laid in a grace, He who is the eternal Son of God through whom the world was made and by whom all things consist. He is going deliberately to all that because that is the only way whereby the door and the gate of heaven can be opened for us. “I go to prepare a place in heaven with God, a mansion for you.
Beloved friend, have you realised that the Lord Jesus Christ has done all that for you? If you see it, if you believe it, you will agree with Paul when he says that you are not your own, you “are bought with a price,” therefore you must give yourself and your life to Him (1 Cor. 6:20). If you believe Him, you can know for certain that He has prepared a place for you and will come again and received you unto Himself so that where He is, you shall be also.”
The Quiet Heart
George Ladd
Christ’s atoning work does not change God’s wrath to love, for God’s love is itself the source of the atonement.
Secret Church, 2015.
Frederick S. Leahy
It is only by the sharp thorn of his [Christ’s] suffering that the poisonous thorn of our sin is drawn.
The Cross He Bore: Meditations on the Sufferings of the Redeemer
C.S. Lewis
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will then we may take that it is worth paying.
C.S. Lewis
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
Martin Luther
We all carry about in our pockets His very nails.
Martin Luther
Christ took our sins and the sins of the whole world as well as the Father’s wrath on his shoulders, and he has drowned them both in himself so that we are thereby reconciled to God and become completely righteous.
Edwin Lutzer
God must either inflict punishment or assume it. And He chose the latter course.
J. Gresham Machen
People sometimes say, indeed, that it makes little difference what theory of the atonement we may hold. Ah, my friends, it makes all the difference in the world. When you contemplate the cross of Christ, do you say merely, with modern theorists, ‘What a noble example of self-sacrifice; I am going to attain favour with God by sacrificing myself as well as He.’ Or do you say with the Bible, ‘He loved me and gave Himself for me; He took my place; He bore my curse; He bought me with His own most precious blood.’ That is the most momentous question that can come to any human soul.
Ricky Maye
Jesus didn’t die to save me from God. Jesus died to save me from myself.
Dwight L. Moody
If you are ready to partake of grace you have not to atone for your sins–you have merely to accept of the atonement. All that you want to do is to cry, “God have mercy upon me,” and you will receive the blessing.
Watchman Nee
The greatest negative in the universe is the Cross, for with it God wiped out everything that was not of Himself: the greatest positive in the universe is the resurrection, for through it God brought into being all.
Stephen King
“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.”
J.I. Packer
Calvary not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom Christ died; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their salvation made actual.
John Piper
The death of Christ is the wisdom of God by which the love of God saves sinners from the wrath of God, and all the while upholds and demonstrates the righteousness of God.
George Whitefield
Jesus was God and man in one person, that God and man might be happy together again.
A.H. Strong
God requires satisfaction because He is holiness, but He makes satisfaction because He is love.
Charles Spurgeon
Throughout the Old Testament this was always the idea of a sin-offering – that of a perfect victim; without offense on its own account, taking the place of the offender; the transference of the offender’s sin to that victim, and that expiation in the person of the victim for the sin done by another.
Jonathan Wilson
In Christ as sacrifice, God our judge is judged in our place, reveals our perpetration of and collaboration with sin, ends our rebellion, forgives our guilt, cleanses us, makes us righteous, and establishes us in the kingdom of peace.
Martin Luther
All His is mine and all mine—my sins, my death, my damnation—is His.
J.H. Kurtz
When the sacrifice of animals is mentioned in the law, making atonement is nearly always expressly mentioned, and for the most part this alone, as being the purpose, end, and fruit of the sacrifice.
Leon Morris
Atonement is secure when life is surrendered, released, set free for a new function…. When a sacrifice was offered, we should see it as a killing of the animal in place of the worshipper and the manipulation of the blood as the ritual presentation to God of the evidence that a death has taken place to atone for sin. When the New Testaments refer to the death of Christ as a sacrifice, we should not understand them to be making some far-fetched identification of his blood with his life. Rather they are solemnly referring to the significance of his death.
The Atonement: It’s Meaning and Significance, InterVarsity Academic, pp. 57, 62.
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